INTRODUCTION

The Vietnam War, also called the American War or the War of Resistance against the American Imperialists, is credited as a key period in shaping how Western trauma studies classified and discussed the impacts of conflict on the psyches of human beings. The Cuban Revolution in 1959 seemed to spark a similarly intense interest from the United States, but with a particular focus on what was a feared reign of censorship and "human rights abuses" on the part of socialist, Marxist, and Leninist Fidel Castro; these fears were often cited as the reasons for the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion and a longstanding U.S. economic embargo against the island. These conflicts impulsed the migration of Cuban and Vietnamese diaspora groups to the United States in two powerful first waves: for Cuban emigrants, this first wave was in the early 1960s as Fidel permanently established a socialist government, and for Vietnamese emigrants it was in 1975, following the Fall (or Liberation) of Saigon that began the reunification of Vietnam as a socialist state. The televisual and journalistic documentation that accompanied the incoming of these groups of migrants (who numbered in the hundreds of thousands from both Cuba and Vietnam), however, tends to focus more on their experiences with violence and political instability as the consequence of a government ideology rather than on the impact of those experiences on refugees' psychological states.

According to 2019 U.S. Census Bureau data, approximately 4,000 immigrants of Cuban national origin reside in New Orleans, and approximately 11,000 of Vietnamese national origin. Here, I have gathered both private and public materials that offer portraits of these individuals in the 1960s and 1970s.

BAYOU

A marshy wetland, often found in flat, low-lying areas in the southern United States (i.e. New Orleans East).

GENTILLY

A neighborhood in New Orleans, on the other side of the Industrial Canal bordering New Orleans East. Anecdotally a home base of Cuban refugees in the 1960s, although no formal data is digitally available to confirm.

NEW ORLEANS EAST

The eastern, most recently developed (ca. 1950s) area of New Orleans, home of Village de l'Est.

VILLAGE DE L'EST

Area in the Versailles neighborhood of New Orleans East, home to approx. 4,000 Vietnamese-New Orleanians per the 2000 census.

Agnew, a pet rabbit owned by my father's family circa 1970, named for Spiro Agnew, a Republican vice president who resigned following accusations of corruption in office.

My great-grandfather's family in Havana; date unknown.

Relatives of my grandmother in Santiago de Cuba; date unknown.

Above: My father in the late 1960s in New Orleans, likely at his parents' Madrid Street residence in the Gentilly neighborhood.

Upper right and bottom right: Family portraits of my father, uncle, and grandmother taken in the late 1960s.

My father, uncle, grandmother, and grandfather in New Orleans in the 1970s.

My father with horses on a finca, ca. late 1970s in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.

The images below contrast the first set on this page; while the Cuban-New Orleanian phenomenon is largely absent from the digital archives of the state, the Vietnamese-New Orleanian presence is closely documented in news broadcasts and published photo essays. To supplant the absence of Cuban materials in New Orleans, I included personal family photos and documents. I would like the viewer to consider what the private photographs are able to impart as portraits of New Orleans residents who felt that they belonged, in comparison to the public and open-access portraits recorded of Vietnamese residents in the 1970s and 1980s by news publications. While Vietnamese-New Orleanians were made others for challenging expectations of assimilation by maintaining a linguistic and cultural enclave in New Orleans East (and for their existence outside the racial Black | white binary in a segregated New Orleans), Cuban-New Orleanians materially documented themselves as part of the local American landscape.

A 1998 article and photo essay developed by a student staff member in The Maroon detailing Village de l'Est in New Orleans East. Courtesy of Louisiana Digital Library.

THE NEW IMMIGRANT ‐ Made with Clipchamp (1).mp4

Above: Lousiana Public Broadcasting, Louisiana: The State We're In (1979). A reporter introduces the difficulties of newly-arrived Vietnamese refugees, and a Vietnamese-New Orleanian pastor notes the lack of New Orleanians' effort to understand the emerging refugee community.

The Louisianian narrative of Vietnamese communities I discovered in the state archives tends to ostracize and exoticize Vietnamese-New Orleanians (as seen in the frequent references to Village de L'Est as a fragment of the "Near East"), and situate their existence in dimensions of labor. Bad politics, on the part of the state.

New Orleans East, 1998.

Original 1998 photoessay title and commentary in The Maroon.

Note that many of these portraits, both in the case of New Orleanian-Vietnamese interviewees and in the case of my family, are taken not by themselves but by journalists and the photography services at local department stores.

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